Information Security News

Google has acquired over 1,000 patents from IBM, as part of its strategy to strengthen its patent portfolio to counter litigation, according to records of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

While Microsoft is embracing the ARM processor architecture for its next Windows client operating system, Windows 8, the company has no immediate plans to develop an ARM-based version of its next Windows Server, the company executive in charge of Windows Server confirmed Wednesday.

StrikeForce Technologies, a small vendor of a keystroke encryption technology, is accusing Microsoft of not acting fast enough to fix a browser issue that it says is preventing StrikeForce's technology from working with Internet Explorer 9.

Nothing gets people excited about technology start-ups like freebies, and there were plenty for the taking at Tuesday night’s Web Innovators Group event in Cambridge, Mass. Though having learned lessons from start-ups that have crashed and burned in recent years from perhaps an excess of generosity without a good way to pay for it, this event that packed in hundreds of entrepreneurs and their followers wasn’t without a good dose of common sense about dollars and cents as well.

Windows Phone 7, Day 13: Pros and Cons of People HubIDG News ServiceI have groups for Family, Tech Geeks, Infosec, PCWorld, and PR people. The group gives me a much shorter list of contacts to scroll through to find who I am looking for. Granted, if I know the person's name it is not really any easier to tap the group ...and more »

U.S. government agencies are getting better at sharing information about cyberattacks with private companies, but cybercrime shows no signs of slowing down, cybersecurity experts told lawmakers Wednesday.

A destructive attack from cyberspace "is coming, in my opinion. It is a question of time. What we don't know is how far out it is," and whether it will target commercial infrastructure, government networks or mobile platforms Army Gen. Keith Alexander told attendees of the "Maneuvering in Cyberspace" symposium this week.

AT&T set up shop in Silicon Valley on Wednesday with its Foundry Development Center in Palo Alto, a facility where software and hardware developers can get help bringing their inventions to the real world.

Android tablets are losing ground to new entrants, including the much-criticized Research In Motion PlayBook and even the discontinued Hewlett-Packard TouchPad, IDC reported in its second quarter report on tablet and e-book sales.

Intel hopes to boost its business selling chips to phone makers -- now the domain of rival ARM -- through a partnership announced this week with Google to develop future Android OS versions for mobile devices with Intel chips.

Symantec this week introduced what it calls the Symantec Certificate Intelligence Center, a cloud-based service that works with an on-premises software component to keep track of SSL server certificates used by an organization.

One day after Microsoft launched the first beta of the next generation of its Windows desktop operating system, Windows 8, the company previewed the next version of its server operating system, Windows Server 8.

For those of you working in a small business with little or no security budget, Russell Eubanks has published a nice paper on implementing the SANS top 20 security controls.
You can check it out here.
Happy reading.
Christopher Carboni - Handler On Duty
(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. http://isc.sans.edu Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Facebook is extending the scope of its site into Twitter and Google+ territory by making it possible for Facebook members to subscribe to each other's public posts without necessarily having to be approved friends.

Parallels and VMWare are locked in an arms-race. Both vendors make software that enables you to run Windows on your Mac. They’ve been stuck in a tit-for-tat release cycle for years now: Every twelve months or so, one of them releases a new version of its software with a bunch of whizzy new features. Some days or weeks afterwards, the other one releases its own new version—usually with many of the same new features.

The hype around cloud computing is hard to ignore and as each vendor is trying to put the word "cloud" in front of all its products, enterprises are finding it extremely difficult to sift through the noise and really find which products work best specifically for their data center.

Popular P2P file sharing company said its systems were breached Tuesday, enabling an attacker to replace its uTorrent client download with scareware.

BitTorrent Inc., which creates popular P2P file sharing software, said it discovered a breach of its systems Tuesday enabling an attacker to replace a file download of its uTorrent client with a scareware program.

The San Francisco-based company said the breach took place at 7:20 a.m. ET and lasted nearly two hours. Anyone attempting to download the standard Windows version of uTorrent would have instead downloaded a fake antivirus program.

BitTorrent said in its blog that the rogue program is called “Security Shield,” and performs like other rogue antivirus programs, popping up phony virus detection warnings and prompting users for payment to remove the bogus discoveries. The company said it made the discovery and immediately took the affected servers offline. It urged users who may have downloaded software between 7:20 a.m. and 9:10 a.m. ET to scan their machines for malware.

“We take the security of our systems and the safety of our users very seriously,” the company said. “We sincerely apologize to any users who were affected.”

After a security analysis, the company determined that neither BitTorrent.com nor the BitTorrent Mainline/Chrysalis clients were compromised in the attack.

Google and Motorola Mobility plan to file for pre-closing antitrust clearances for the merger of Motorola with a Google subsidiary in a number of jurisdictions including Canada, China, Israel, Russia, Taiwan and Turkey, in addition to filings in the U.S. and before the European Commission.

Cisco Systems emerged from 150 days of restructuring on Tuesday as an aggressive competitor, laying out some of the problems that led it to make changes, while saying its rivals are in even worse predicaments.

Israeli start-up Anobit on Wednesday is announcing its second generation of SSDs based on consumer NAND flash technology. The company has doubled capacity to 800GB, halved the size of its circuitry and added a SAS connector.